Trump Assassination Attempt - A Stochastic Terror Event?

One of the benefits of living in the UK is that I'm not living in the US*, and therefore I feel less under pressure than many to respond to things that happen there. But this, I think, is an exception. The events of Saturday evening in Butler, Pennsylvania are being vigorously discussed around the globe, and everyone—including everyone's dog and cat (and goldfish)—has an opinion on what happened. So I thought I should reveal at least some of what's in my mind on the matter.

What I am not about to do is to offer a deep analysis. I don't have time for that, and there are plenty of people already doing that anyway, so I'll gratefully leave that to them and benefit from their wisdom in the days and weeks to come. Instead, I simply want to indicate how I'm thinking at the moment. I am open to argument and evidence that might change my mind, but the way I currently interpret what happened goes like this.

1) The Trump Assassination Attempt (I am currently inclined to believe) was a deep-state operation to kill Donald Trump (thus preventing him from becoming US President for a second time). I am inclined towards this for the following reasons.

2) Assassination seems to be the logical conclusion after all the other attempts to bring him down seem to have failed. (Many have been predicting such an attempt for quite some time, and it gives me a slightly strange feeling that my fellow "A Stand in the Park"-ers and I were discussing the likelihood of a Trump assassination—to be carried out by a supposed "Republican" no less—just six days before.)

3) By all accounts the US Secret Service was unusually and inexplicably lax that day. Not only did their marksmen "fail" to neutralise a threat that would (or should) have been clearly in their sights, but they "failed" to secure the area in such a way as to prevent the shooter from accessing an obvious vantage point; and they seem to have ignored crucial warnings from members of the public. (I note that "agency failures" are hallmarks of events such as the JFK Assassination and 9/11.)

Update: According to Chris Martenson's excellent work, there may be reason to suspect a second shooter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUoBcp1me0). Also in that report, the Head of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, gives (on ABC News) the extremely lame excuse that they didn't station anyone on the alleged shooter's roof because of health and safety (!) - it was a bit too steep - even though they did station marksmen on other, even steeper, roofs.

"That building in particular had a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there's a safety factor that would be considered there: that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building from inside." (emphasis added)

4) We are already being told by establishment outlets like the BBC that we shouldn't "speculate" or entertain "conspiracy theories", because such would only serve to "politicise" matters (as if a politically motivated event shouldn't be thought about in political terms), but rather that we should leave it to the FBI to carry out its impartial investigations and reveal the truth to us in due course. In other words: "Shut up, stop thinking, and accept that this was Lone Nut Plus Security Failures" (from which "lessons must be learned") and that's that.

5) I am aware of the hoax view, but I am not persuaded by it. I appreciate that Trump has benefited from this hugely in political terms, but I don't think that is suspicious enough to warrant the view that this was a pro-Trump false flag. (The famous photograph is certainly an impressive piece of visual propaganda—with its American flag, red (blood), white (shirts), and blue (jackets/sky), Trump's fist in the air plus defiant look, and shot in monumental style from below—but I think this is propaganda by selection, not by construction. There are many images available of the immediate aftermath, no doubt burst-mode exposures from which news outlets were able to choose and to which image editors could apply appropriate framing and subtle filters.) I also think it highly unlikely that a hypothesised pro-Trump gunman would have shot so near to Trump's head—or if he didn't, and Trump used fake blood for his ear, that the gunman would have continued to shoot so as to murder a fellow Trump supporter in the crowd and seriously injure two others; or, if the gunman was anti-Trump but being handled by pro-Trump operatives, that he would have been trusted to miss Trump at such a dangerously close range.

Update: Further on the idea that this was a pro-Trump hoax, it also strikes me as highly implausible that Trump would resort to such as this. Not least, he's a front runner for the US presidential election, so why risk it all by agreeing to something that, if it were to go seriously wrong, would completely blow him out of the race?

(I know there's the whole "White Hat" theory in which pretty much everything is being controlled by deep-state "White Hats" (WHs), who are orchestrating everything to look bad so as to "wake everyone up" to how evil things are before some kind of WH military take-over that will put the "good guys" back in charge permanently. But I can't buy into any of that. Whenever I talk to anybody who's into that way of thinking, I find myself arguing against a wall of unfalsifiability where everything "fits" the theory one way or another and in which ad hoc "explanations" are brought into the discussion to neutralise any analytical points I care to raise. OK, it could be true—in a broadly logical sense—but I've no good reason to believe it. So I'll stick to the data at hand, use Occam's Razor lightly, and prefer simpler explanations over fantastical ones. That's just me.)

6) I find interesting the concept of a stochastic terror event in this regard, which (the often untrustworthy, but sometimes useful) Wikipedia defines as:

"Stochastic terrorism is targeted political violence that has been instigated by hostile public rhetoric directed at a group or individual. Unlike incitement to terrorism, this is accomplished by using indirect, vague, or coded language that allows the instigator to plausibly disclaim responsibility for the resulting violence."

Along these lines the Trump Assassination Attempt could be understood (perhaps) as a combination of deliberate security "failure" plus stochastic terrorism, in which months and years of encouraging people to accuse Trump of being a "threat to democracy", "threat to the Republic", and names like "pro-Putin traitor", "Hitler" or "Mussolini", etc., might have been (in part) designed to encourage unbalanced individuals to take "democracy" into their own hands and remove The Donald Threat from the face of the Earth for good—and for Good—while the ultimate instigators of both the "failures" and the "stochastic terror" would remain hidden from from view.

7) The more I think about "stochastic terror" the less impressed I am by the concept and the less relevant I think it is. Its main weakness, I think, is that it encourages the idea that over-heated political rhetoric is a type of violence, which is bad news from a freedom-of-speech perspective; its main strength, I think, is that it names an obvious truth, that to foster a culture of nasty political speech aimed at "x" is likely to increase the probability that physical violence might be aimed at "x". It's only the second aspect that interests me.** But I'm not sure it has much explanatory power here, because it leaves unexplained why the Secret Service "failures" just happened to coincide with the appearance of this particular shooter. So, a little reluctantly, I'm tending towards the thought that the shooter was "handled" in some way.

Again, this is just how I'm thinking at the moment. It's early days, and, as I say, I am open to changing my mind on any of it. So, please feel free to agree/disagree and discuss. (Smile. Don't get cross. We'll probably never know for sure anyway.)

(* I'm not saying there aren't benefits of living in the US rather than the UK.)

(** I'm not interested in it because I think it justifies the passing of "hate speech" laws. I think "hate speech" is a very dangerous idea in itself. As Jordan Peterson rightly says, we must put up with speech that hurts people's feelings because it's a necessary price to pay to live in free societies. I just find it interesting because it names a phenomenon that could be exploited.)